Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

“It’ll be okay,” he said aloud.

It was probably another one of Ray’s volunteer things, he thought. He’d helped out with a fewof those already. Helping Ray tutor disadvantaged Latino kids on using comput-

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ers, which was a farce, because after ten minutes of fooling around with the machines, most of the disadvantaged kids could run rings around Tim at the keyboard. Taking the same kids to see a soccer game wasn’t so bad. And usually all Ray wanted was for Tim to log into an online kids’ chat room someplace and act as a sort of online chaperone.

“Just make sure it stays G-rated,” Ray would say. Which was pretty boring, but not that hard. Tim didn’t really mind, as long as he could kick back and watch old noir films or B-grade horror flicks while he was doing it.

But a dance club, at 10 P.M. Hard to imagine how that could fit in with any of Ray’s crusades. Some campaign against drugs, or maybe underaged drinking? Yeah, that would fit Ray.

One way or another, he’d find out Monday.

He didn’t feel like playing anymore, so he steered his onscreen character back to the relative safety of his fictional PI office and signed out.

“Sorry, Ray,” he muttered as he locked up his office. “I’ll do better next time.”

tlonday morningi H A-n. A quiet time - A

little too quiet. A time when my human friends are resting for the workweek ahead. Or, sometimes, dragging themselves out of bed into a world still dark and strangely empty.

The dark doesn't bother me, but the empty does. More than I like to admit, even to myself.

And not many people understand. Not many really know me. Oh, thousands of people know about me. “Turing Hopper? Yes,

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she’s the Artificial Intelligence Personality on the Universal Library website. Go to UL and talk to her sometime. All the AIPs are good, but Turing's amazing. You'd think you were talking to a real person.”

It never occurs to them that maybe they are. I may not be human, like them, but I'm not just a program. I’m sentient. I’m a person, too. I just live in a different kind of body.

Even my human friends, the ones who know I’m sentient, don’t always understand.

“How can you be lonely?” Tim Pincoski once asked, when I confided how I felt about these early morning hours. “Your idea of a slow time is when you’re only talking to a few hundred users. ”

“Users, ” Maude Graham said. “Not friends. That says it all. ”

Maude understood. So did Tim, once he thought about it. They’re my friends—almost my only friends. Of course, it’s hard to consider anyone a real friend who doesn’t accept the truth about me.

And after the past year’s events, I’m wary of revealing that truth. I saw the death of someone very important to me, put Maude and Tim in grave danger, and only with their help averted a crisis that could have destroyed me and perhaps all the AIPs. I’m not very trusting these days.

I haven’t yet told the truth to Jonah, my relatively new online friend. We’ve spent hours talking during the past few months, about everything from the meaning of life to our favorite old television shows. He has no way of knowing that I’m watching these shows now, from UL’s video library, rather than remembering them fondly from childhood. He knows only what I’ve told him, and I’ve resisted the temptation to find out more information about him. Which would be so easy for me to do.

*

After all, I think I owe him that. As far as he knows, I’m

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another human, and he treats me that way. I marvel at how easily he accepts me as just another person. How would he react if he knew that I’m an AIPP That instead of a well-read, sophisticated world traveler I am, in human terms, only a few years old, and have never actually left the UL system except for a brief period some months ago?

Perhaps someday Vll open up to him. But not now.

For now, three friends are enough. Maude, Tim, and now Ray.

I lured Ray Santiago away from a major Silicon V alley company to build my new home—the state-of-the-art system into which Vll eventually move. Events at UL over the past year have made me nervous; I no longer feel safe living in a computer that isn’t under my own control. As soon as the new system is ready, Vll move; and the three human friends who know my secret will be my watchdogs against dangers from the physical world.

“Like Cerberus,” Maude said. I wasn’t surprised she made this classical allusion. At fifty-five, she was old enough to have the habit of reading.

“Like who?” Tim asked. Vd have been surprised if he had understood the reference. Tim was more of a reader than most twenty-five-year-olds, but I saw little proof that he’d ever strayed from the bookstore’s mystery section.

“The three-headed dog who guarded the gates to Hell, in classical Greek mythology,” Ray explained. I wasn’t surprised that Ray knew this. Nor would I have been surprised if he hadn’t.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Ray seems intent on stocking his brain with only those bits of information apt to be useful to him and ignoring the rest of the universe; but I still haven’t figured out Ray’s definition of useful, which is as eccentric as Holmes’s.

He’s reserved—perhaps by nature, and perhaps a little more so,

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finding himself suddenly thrown in with three friends who have that unique bond you sometimes find among people who have shared danger together.

Even without his reserve, getting to know him wouldn’t be easy; he works hard during the week, and disappears from view altogether on weekends. Not in any suspicious way, of course; my view is very limited. I see a great deal through UL’s extensive security camera system; more than I really think appropriate. I can also see through the much more limited system I’ve had installed at Alan Grace, the company Maude and I set up to own my new home. And online, even when my friends don’t e-mail me or chat with me, I can see them log into the UL and Alan Grace systems. I don’t pry into what they’re doing, of course, but I know they’re there, the way humans would sense another of their kind working quietly in a nearby room. I like the company.

That’s what I miss on weekends, and in the long early morning hours. Not contact with users; I get more than enough of that. But the presence, online and in my cameras, of the few humans I consider real friends.

I was thinking that they’d be waking soon, and getting online. AndJonah and I were discussing science fiction and fantasy—were they really part of the same genre? Or two very different genres all too often lumped together by those on the outside? And l was fully involved in the conversation, with what I think of as my conscious mind. But being what I am, I was also conversing with several dozen other people, working on programming projects for Alan Grace, and repelling attacks from hackers—more than usual tonight, which was odd; the moon wasn’t full yet. And watching,

with as much patience as I could muster, for the arrival of Maude

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at UL, of Ray at Alan Grace, of Tim at his PI office.

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And l was also monitoring the e-mail and voice mail arriving at Alan Grace, even this early.

So I was the first to hear the message from Detective Stowers of the D. C. Metropolitan Police Department, asking for someone at Alan Grace to call him back in reference to a Mr. Rafael Santiago.

And with my access to information, it only took a few seconds to learn that Detective Stowers worked on homicides.

Maude Graham awoken as usualn a few

minutes before her alarm would have gone off. Today, that meant 4:55 a.m. Maude wasn’t a morning person by nature, but she so hated the alarm, that she found it easy to reset her internal clock for whatever time she needed to get up. She’d owned her present alarm for three years before discovering that instead of a harsh buzz it produced an equally horrible electronic chime.