Kyle Kirkland: Connections

Half the crystals of my projector needed replacing and my eyes were gummed with sleep, but I managed to recognize the grainy 3-D image that had appeared in my room. There was a dead man staring at me.

The image spoke softly in that familiar gravelly voice. “I hope I didn’t wake you, El. I know you keep odd hours.”

“Arden,” I said, trying to work some saliva back into my mouth. Arden Kirst, my old mentor. Last Friday his car disconnected from the power rail and plunged two hundred feet into a utility substation.

Slowly my brain got into gear. Things like this used to happen often back when I was growing up—people forgetting to make preparations beforehand to switch off their artificial-intelligence systems. I remembered getting a birthday greeting every year from a great-aunt who’d died in 2015. But it didn’t happen so much with the newer models.

The AI stood in my room, where the projectors were aimed, looking very much like Arden—piercing gray eyes and jutting chin—and squinted at me. The AI’s sensors were probably having trouble seeing me—the image transmission of my home communicator wasn’t in any better shape than the projector—and the system represented this fact in the AI’s image.

“Did you attend my services?” asked the simulacrum.

I coughed. “Well, I…”

“Yes, yes, of course. I know how it is. Busy and all that.”

Actually, Nadia nixed the funeral service because she said those things were mostly pomp and pretence. But we’d gathered last night for a farewell dinner. Some of us had drowned our sorrow in too much alcohol. I had a distinct and unpleasant memory that one of us greatly exceeded the bounds of good taste and manners. That someone, I believe, was me.

But I wasn’t going to try to explain our grief to an AI with the emotional capacity of a child. I sat up on my bed and put my feet on the floor. One foot touched cold concrete and the other landed on a crumpled suit. Three walls and a high-resolution screen enclosed me. The sound muffler failed to prevent my hearing a neighbor practicing for a rock-and-roll gig.

“You’re always on a case,” said the AI. “Actually, that’s why I called. My apologies for failing to warn you. Bit awkward, I know.”

“What do you want?”

“My death was no accident,” said the AI. “Of that you can be sure.”

I wasn’t sure about anything. We’d talked about it over the weekend. Arden had seemed depressed before he died, so suicide was a possibility. But the cops said it was probably an accident.

The AI said, “I want you to find out what really happened.”

It’s not that I didn’t care. Just the opposite—I cared too much. A seasoned biodet avoided cases like that.

The AI misunderstood my hesitation. “I can pay. A lot of the estate slipped through Yoobie’s fingers—some of my patent royalties haven’t been frozen.”

“Forget the money.”

“But… you won’t take the case? I thought we were friends. I don’t understand.”

I wasn’t sure I understood either. “I’ll look into it,” I told him. “Pro bono.”

“You will? Splendid!”

Maybe it was because I didn’t trust the cops. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t such a seasoned biodet. But I was also suspicious.

The AI shook its finger. “It was Yoobie. Yoobie had a hand in it, I’m certain of that.”

I didn’t think so. If it had been a sabotage job, it was a clever one. Which would have required an unprecedented degree of competence from the Bureaus.

I told the AI that I might need to dig through Arden’s personal files later. It said it would “stick around” and provide access whenever I wanted. Then it logged off the comm.

Unusual. Most AIs wouldn’t have taken the initiative to call me. If they weren’t terminated, they’d keep performing their preassigned duties, putting in digital appearances when the owner was unavailable and making low-level decisions using algorithms that were supposed to mimic the owner’s personality and behavior. Or, if idle, an AI typically would have gone into standby mode.

After washing up and downing a tasteless vegmix, I headed out. My vision remained blurry but feeling and motivation had come roaring back. A lot of things had been going wrong lately, and not just within our organization, because it was happening to Yoobie officials too. A number of suspicious and unexplained deaths had occurred—Arden, Yvonne, and a few others came to mind. Many of them looked like suicides. We knew Yoobie was suppressing the news about the deaths, which was normal since they always suppressed bad news.

But when things start to go wrong, the government was a good place to start looking for the cause.

A young woman with honey-colored hair and an angular face was waiting at the usual booth in Brohm’s speakeasy on 33rd. To the microphone I said, “Bottle of Coke.” To my assistant I said, “I know I’m over thirty and my memory isn’t what it used to be, but don’t I have three assistants?”

Barbara gave me a cool look. I’ve seen Barbara smile once, but that was when Jake slipped getting onto a conveyor and got his backside wedged between the rails, after which the supposedly nonslip surface became nonslip again and did a marvelous job of gripping the seat of his trousers and pulling the pants, along with hot red boxer underwear, down to his ankles.

Barbara pulled out a comm from her purse. “Shall I call the others and tell them to get down here?”

“You realize Yoobie often monitors public networks?”

She smirked. “And responds to suspicious activity in an average of twenty minutes, in which case all the contraband will have vanished and everybody will be sipping Yoobie beer and discussing biodiversity.”

“Every once in a while they can sneak up on you.” Which reminded me of Arden, and the possibility that his suicide or accident was neither. “I’ll contact Sandra and Jake later. Right now I’ve got a mission for you.” I pulled out my comm and transferred the necessary data to her device via a direct link.

She looked at her screen and grimaced.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Same old crap. I go to the Bureau of Statistics and start filling out forms and initiate the month-long process to get the information we need, while you, I’m sure, will proceed to obtain it in a hour or two.”

“Right.”

Barbara slammed her comm into her purse.

“We need to keep up appearances,” I told her. “Patience is a virtue. And a necessity if you have to deal with the government.”

“But that’s just it! You don’t deal with Yoobie. That’s what I wanted to learn from you.”

Sometimes I suspected that we trained our new people too slowly. Particularly smart ones like Barbara. But you have to be careful.

“First you learn to walk,” I said. “Then run, and then fly—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t trust me. That’s the trouble.”

A bot brought my drink. I noticed the table was otherwise empty. “Buy you something?”

“I had a peppermint earlier.”

“Have another.”

“No, thanks. Too many refined carbs really aren’t good for you. Just because the United Bureaus forbid something doesn’t mean you should eat or drink it all the time.”

I took a swig of Coke. “You’ve got a lot to learn about freedom.” I belched and hoped Brohm’s carbon dioxide scrubbers were working. We worked hard to undermine Yoobie’s authority so that we could preserve as much freedom as possible. You’ve got to enjoy freedom to the fullest whenever you have the opportunity.

Barbara frowned and slipped out of the booth. “Excuse me, I’ve got a date with a bunch of bureaucrats.”