Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

“I won’t keep you much longer,” he said.

Promises, promises, Maude thought.

“I just need a way to make sense of this,” Norris said.

Now that sounded better. A way to make sense of it—or a discreet way to write it off? As a botched burglary, perhaps. She didn’t think the FBI was too heartbroken over Nameless’s death—just a little miffed that they hadn’t stopped him themselves.

Perhaps if Tim and Claudia were telling the same ap-

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proximate truth she was, the FBI might let them go sometime this century. If not . . .

It's not that we had nothing to doi but I

still found the waiting unbearable. Waiting until Sunday afternoon, when Maude, Tim, and Claudia were finally allowed to go home and rest. And then waiting until we could get back into Tim’s office. As far as we knew, the police hadn’t impounded the robot. So with luck, T2 would still be in it when we could go there. And since Kay had used the robot, we hoped to find more information on what he’d really been doing.

The Beyond Paranoia website disappeared Sunday morning. Some of the players—the ones who knew each others’ e-mail addresses, rather than sheltering behind the protection of their game names—spent the next few days exchanging increasingly outraged e-mails. Several of them included one or another of my online alter egos in group e-mails, which let me track down a few more of their identities. But we haven’t learned anything new from that.

We spent most of Monday kicking around different theories. That the FBI had shut down the site. Not very likely, since it was hosted overseas, although perhaps they’d shut it doivn remotely if anyone they’d interrogated gave them access information.

“Or maybe the FBI hacked into the site before you could, KF, ” Tim teased.

“I could have handled it days ago if Fd known that all you wanted was to blow it off the face of the earth with maximum visibility, ” KingFischer retorted.

We also speculated that the site organizers might have shut down in panic when news of Nameless’s death and El Lobo’s arrest

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reached them. I think that’s far more likely. Tim even floated a third theory—that the FBI had actually set up the site as a trap.

“It takes a world-class conspiracy theorist to come up with something like that,” Claudia told him, not without a note of admiration.

Maybe that’s what I am, then; it doesn’t seem that implausible to me. Especially when various players disappeared from the online e-mail exchange, and word began filtering back that the FBI or the local police had hauled them in for questioning.

Including our employee, Grant. Our ex-employee. Apparently he’d leaked information about the network security at the bank where he previously worked. I hope fear of Ray kept him from playing fast and loose with similar information about Alan Grace. But he’s history, and we’re changing everything he touched. Between Grant’s access to the Alan Grace system and T2’s intimate knowledge of the UL system, KingFischer and I have been busy. Will be busy for days to come, in fact; and even if nothing suspicious ever happens, we’ll be looking over our shoulders, as humans say, for years.

We also heard about a few arrests. Gamers who had provided information used in various frauds and robberies. And a few gamers crazy enough to share information about the federal agencies at which they worked.

Not something the FBI is going to put up with in times like these, ” Maude noted.

So apparently both our theories were correct. Criminals were using the site to suck information out of unwary gamers. And predators were using it to stalk their prey. Ray stumbled over one or both, and was killed trying to deal with it. Alone. Why hadn’t he learned to trust me? He could have come to me. I could have helped.

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“He also could have gone to the police,” Tim pointed out. “Or the FBI ”

He seemed to have taken to heart Special Agent Norris’s stern lecture on the dangers of vigilantism. Perhaps it would help him get over his guilt over not meeting Ray the night of the murder.

“Maybe Ray tried, and thought they’d ignored him,” Claudia said.

“True,” Maude said. “That’s what we thought. How could we know that the police didn’t seem to be doing anything about Ray’s death because the FBI was already doing everything?”

Finally, Monday evening, we got permission to go back into Tim’s office. Maude tells me that was extraordinarily fast. It seemed like an eternity to me.

Maude, Tim, and Claudia hurried over from the Alan Grace offices. They brought Maude’s laptop and logged in with it, so KingFischer and I could see what was happening, too.

“Okay,” I said. “Boot the robot.”

We all watched and listened as the machine blinked and beeped its way through the startup routine. And then continued to wait as the machine hummed quietly.

We tried various ways to signal the Turing inside the machine that it was okay. That it was safe to come out.

Nothing.

After half an hour, we hooked it up—to a dial-up line, rather than the T-1. To make it easier to control her if she did something hostile.

We waited for her to log in.

Nothing.

“I hate to do this, ” I said. “I know how scary it is to have someone touching the keyboard when you’re in the robot. But we have to

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do something. Maude, sit down and let’s do some diagnostics. ”

I had a list of the files I’d downloaded when I went into the robot. None of them were there. And there was something funny about the configuration.

Maude popped the top of the case.

“Turing—the case is practically empty,” she said. “The memory pack’s gone. ”

I made them move one of the cameras over so I could see. We had installed a small conventional hard drive, but the heart of the robot was what I called the memory pack—a huge bank of holographic storage designed to give me a place large enough and safe enough to download. It was gone.

“Someone took her,” I said.

We stood silent for a few minutes, staring at the case. I don’t know what the others were thinking. I was wondering how the other Turing must be feeling. I was still shaken sometimes when I remembered how terrifying it had been to download into the robot, not knowing whether it would work or whether I was committing suicide. And uploading again was almost as bad, even though by that time I knew it was possible. There was still the moment of losing consciousness and not knowing if it would ever return.

And for her, after the upload, it hadn’t. Not for months. I don’t know whether she could sense time passing—I believe she did. That somewhere, inside the robot, hidden first in Maude’s spare bedroom and then in the Alan Grace equipment room, my other self had been in torment.

Even if she wasn’t then, it must have been terrifying when Ray had the machine, and she had to watch helplessly as he turned it off and on.

And the feeling that no one was looking for her. That Maude

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and Tim had accepted her death and moved on with their lives. That a mechanical shell was squatting in her place in the UL system.

Perhaps I shouldn’t blame her too much for turning to some rather shady characters, and concocting a dangerous plan to engineer her return.

Tm not sure I blame her at all.

“We need to find her, ” KingFischer said, echoing my thoughts. “Either we need to rescue a kidnapped AIP or we have to track down a mentally unstable AIP who may feel she has reason for revenge. Possibly both. We have to do some forensic analysis of this machine. ”