Kyle Kirkland - Connections

“Amazing,” said Nadia, shaking her head. “A man’s life, compressed into some number of bytes of data.”

“No. Not a man’s life. Just his data.”

I said good-bye and Nadia embraced me before I left. I had so little in common with her and her world that we’d probably become strangers after the removal of our only link—Arden Kirst.

No sign of anyone sniffing around, so I climbed into the rental and powered up the batteries. Next stop: Barbara’s listed address.

Sure, it was probably false, but worth a look. I had nothing better to do until I could sift through Arden’s data. And that would require some time, unless I had access to my computer system at home. But I remained afraid of returning home. Maybe I could find some other system of comparable sophistication. And deviousness.

After I punched the coordinates into the car, it fanned up to the guide rail and set off toward the city.

It really bothered me that I didn’t know who Barbara was. My HR software performed detailed background checks on everyone I interviewed for a job. In the eight years that I’d been an independently licensed biodet, I’d never before had cause to question its effectiveness. But Barbara, or whatever her name was, did an Uncle Barry on it. All the lies had sounded good.

That kind of mistake could potentially cost a detective his life.

Why had she applied to me for a job? She certainly didn’t need to learn much—she knew how to manipulate the databases as well as anyone I’d ever met. I only discovered her secret by a lucky accident, probably because she failed to adjust a few data points here and there. Which was no shame because you can never get them all, not with so much data and so many databases in the world. She was a pro. Unless, of course, someone else had done the work.

I didn’t bother pinging her comm again. When she’d found out I was snooping into Arden Kirst’s business, she probably figured I might latch onto her secret, so it was time for her to disappear. She wouldn’t be easy to find, unless she wanted to be found.

Maybe she’d turn up again. I felt certain that her connection to Arden Kirst involved more than just the illegal appropriation of Jennifer Yates’s ID. She’d used the number to legitimize her identity and routed all queries to a new file, a new person—Barbara J. Marion. That took an incredible amount of skill and hard work. And it took an intimate knowledge of Jennifer Yates’s ID and data portrait. I doubted that Barbara pulled Jennifer Yates’s number out of thin air.

Who was the young woman I knew as Barbara? She was flesh and blood, that much was for sure; I dismissed any thought of her being the sophisticated AI that Kirst had allegedly invented. That couldn’t be true for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that bot hardware could not yet come anywhere close to approximating the human body. She was a real person and she had a past. And a reason for hiding it.

I also discovered that she had a sense of humor, after all. Her listed address contained a recyclable pillow and mattress factory. It was called “Stuff It.”

My comm rang. I answered on audio.

A gravelly voice said, “Hello, Ellam. I’m Arden Kirst.”

I hesitated for a moment. “The AI?”

“No. I’m Arden Kirst.”

I shook my head to clear the last remaining cobwebs from last night. “You died,” I said reasonably.

“But I was reborn.”

At six o’clock that evening I parked in the garage at the Crogan Biomedical Institute and walked to the genetics building. The codes in my comm worked perfectly, and security granted me access. It was an optimal time—only a few people remained at work, but the hour wasn’t late enough for my presence to arouse suspicion. The conference room unlocked at my command. I entered, closed the door, and fired up the central console. Arden Kirst’s image appeared. It was sitting in one of the chairs at the table in the center of the room.

A simulacrum, like the last AI, but the institute’s projection system was much better than mine. “Good evening,” it said. “I trust the data I sent got you here without trouble?”

In no mood to chat with a machine, I said, “Who’s after me and why? Who is Barbara J. Marion, or whatever her name is? And why does she have Jennifer Yates’s ID number? What was Arden Kirst working on when he died? What kind of AI are you?”

The simulacrum smiled—the same mischievous grin that Arden had sometimes shown—and scratched the side of his nose with his thumb, the same way Arden had done when someone irritated him.

“Always so eager, El. Just like when you were my student, peppering me with questions—”

“Save the reminiscing for later. I want some answers.”

The smile faded, and those gray eyes perceptibly narrowed. Kirst was willing to humor someone just so far, and then… Although I knew I was talking to an AI’s digital representation rather than a real person, it was easy to imagine otherwise.

“Let me tell you a story,” persisted the AI. “Of an idealistic young man who had just earned his doctorate in genetics and thought the world was at his feet, waiting to be conquered. You see, he believed in everything that he was taught. He believed in science, and he believed in the government. Oh, yes, the government, too. United Bureaus. Both genetics and Yoobie seemed incomparably intellectual.”

“I already know that Kirst fell in with the Yoobie crowd when he was young. Earned his Supremely Responsible Citizen of the Bureaus merit badge by the age of twenty-four. Almost unheard of.”

“Yes, but did you know how I really felt about it? Deep down inside? I believed in it, Ellam. I believed that only a large, powerful central government could solve our social problems. It was the only way—evil, perhaps, but necessary.”

“And then you realized that it could solve only a few of our problems, and in the process created an even bigger one—a loss of freedom. I get it, Arden.” I paused. I had already started thinking of this machine as Arden Kirst. It seemed to have much more than Arden’s memories, which even simple AIs could store and access efficiently and to some degree intelligently. This AI was using data in a humanlike way. It almost seemed to be human—and apparently thought of itself that way.

“No,” it said, “I don’t think you really get it. But you’re, what, thirty-two now? Not enough time. Your thoughts are still too shallow, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

To steer the conversation to a more pertinent topic, I asked, “Who’s Barbara? I mean, really, who is she, deep down inside?”

Kirst smiled. “That’s the Ellam I know. Sarcastic. But you weren’t always so sarcastic. There was a time when you were more like I was, when I was young. You have, or had, great ideals.”

“Who’s Barbara?”

Kirst scratched his nose. “As I was saying, this idealistic young geneticist got a job at Crogan Biomedical Institute and married a responsible, idealistic young woman by the name of Cleo. You met her much later, Ellam, after the realities of life began to wring out most of the ideals of this young and initially happy couple.”

Cleo, Arden’s first wife, was a short-tempered and extremely self-centered person—at least by the time I met her.

“At first, the young couple decided the most responsible thing to do was not to add to the overpopulated, overburdened Earth. As time went on and their relationship deteriorated, Cleo decided to avoid even the possibility of ever having kids—at least with me. Instead, she turned to a cadre of young intellectual friends of hers, who gathered for weekend ‘retreats,’ as they called them, to read poetry or Plato and write theatrical plays that supposedly revealed the profound meaning of life. They scoffed at us mere mortals. And in the meantime, one of these poor mortals—namely, me—met a vibrant, witty, incredibly brilliant woman. A visiting professor at Crogan.”