Донна Эндрюс: Click here for murder

Thinking of KingFischer reminded me that he, too, knew Ray.

*

Ray had begun participating in KingF ischer’s chess tournaments,

Donna Andrews

helping come up with some new ideas for them. I should have told KF the news right away. And he’s so preoccupied with security today that I don’t know if he’s had time to find out for himself.

I fired off a message, giving all the information we knew so far, which of course wasn’t much. I admit, I was hoping KingFischer would react. These days, my ever-evolving criteria for sentience — Turing’s Turing test, you might call it—tends to include the ability to form genuine attachments to other beings. I try to make allowances for KingFischer, since I know his personality was modeled after several real-life chess grandmasters who might have a hard time passing a Turing test themselves. But even making fairly generous allowances, KingFischer always seems to fall very far short of my minimum standards in the genuine attachment area.

I was hoping for a reaction. I wasn’t expecting one. I certainly wasn’t expecting hysteria. I was trying to concentrate on the changes 1 was making in the Alan Grace security system when he interrupted me with a top-priority message. Top priority is supposed to be reserved for life-or-death things like a major successful hack attack, or imminent failure of critical hardware.

“Turing, that’s one of your attempts at humor, isn’t it?” KingFischer said. “I remember your saying that humor sometimes skirts the edges of poor taste; if you ask me, that goes way over the edge and isn’t the slightest bit funny.”

“I wish it was a joke, KF,” I said. “Kay’s really dead.”

“But this is a disaster,” KingFischer said. “What happened?”

He seemed so genuinely upset that I didn’t say anything snide, just reminded him of the information Fd sent a few seconds earlier.

“Is this all you know?” he demanded, milliseconds later.

“So far, ” I said. “Maude, Tim, and I are all investigating. I’ll let you know what we learn. ”

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KingFischer vanished. Well, actually, he didn’t go anywhere, simply stopped communicating, hut with an abruptness that even most AIPs would find inappropriate. Okay, he’s definitely showing signs of sentience. Does he also have to he so rude? Even the least sentient AIP would normally transmit some indication that he was finished communicating with me. But not KingFischer. It was several minutes before I was really sure he’d turned his attention elsewhere, and wasn’t just analyzing the minimal data on Pay’s death in some weird, chess-oriented fashion. Lately, he’d been obsessed with the powers of 2. As in each player has 16 chess pieces (2 to the fourth power); there are 32 pieces on the board (2 to the fifth power), and 64 squares on the board (2 to the sixth power). He’ll probably come back this afternoon to share the numerological implications of Ray’s murder. Fd rather hear humans discuss Nostradamus or argue about whether or not the Mob killed President Kennedy.

I went back to the security changes. And to wishing I really believed the changes would be enough, even after I got KingFischer to vet them. After all, Ray died more than twenty-four hours ago. If someone killed him for the secrets he knew, secrets about me and the Alan Grace system, his killers had had his laptop and PDA for more than a day. Time enough, if they had enough resources. Time enough to plant all kinds of Trojans and worms in places I woiddn’t even think to look. I could, if necessary, roll back all the Alan Grace systems to the Friday night backup—the electronic equivalent of turning back the clock to a time when Ray was still alive, and his secrets still intact. But that wouldn’t prevent them from using the knowledge they could have gleaned in those twenty-

four hours to plant bugs where I couldn’t look, in systems I couldn’t

*

roll back—systems that feed data into the Alan Grace system.

Donna Andrews

Ray’s death would mean postponing my long-anticipated move into the nearly complete Alan Grace system. Not just by whatever period of time it took the remaining staff to complete the work Ray was overseeing. But by as much time as it took for me to be sure that I wasn’t moving into a new home where the burglars had already broken in and taken up residence.

Strange. This realization should have made me angry, or sad, or even impatient. Instead, I find myself feeling an odd sense of relief.

Back in her own office at Alan Gracei

Maude made another call to a coworker at UL. Turing had set it up so the call would be routed through her home phone. If anyone noticed the number on the caller ID, they ’d think she was exactly where she’d said she would be—home with a cold. And Turing had routed her home phone to her spare line at Alan Grace; if anyone from the office called to ask her an urgent question, she could feign a suitable degree of hoarseness and sleepiness.

A message appeared on the computer screen.

“I’ve done some quick fixes to our security,” Turing said.

“Quick fixes?” Maude echoed. “Will that be enough?”

“I don’t know,” Turing said after a pause. “I doubt it. We’re going to have to rethink everything.”

“I see,” Maude said. “And that means delaying your transfer into the new system. Disappointing.”

“Not really,” Turing said. “You may not believe this, but I’m actually glad we have to postpone.”

“I do believe it,” Maude said. “I’ve noticed you seemed a

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33

little . . . tentative about the transfer, even before Ray’s death. I’ve been wondering why.”

Another pause. Did the pauses really mean that Turing needed the time to think of her answer, Maude wondered, or had Turing learned how to pause to give her words proper emphasis?

“I’ve experienced some odd symptoms recently,” Turing said. “Ever since I got back into the UL system, actually. I’m worried that maybe downloading and then uploading again didn’t go as smoothly as I originally thought they did.”

Symptoms, Maude thought, with a sudden stomachtwisting surge of anxiety. She must mean mental symptoms. Psychological symptoms. The idea that Turing might suffer some psychological aftermath from her traumatic experiences was not unthinkable. But it was frightening. Frightening to Maude as Turing’s friend, because she cared what happened to Turing. And frightening to Maude as a human, because she knew better than anyone what kind of powers Turing had. The idea of Turing malfunctioning . . .

“What kind of symptoms?” she said, pushing the sudden terrifying thoughts to the back of her mind, where she hoped they’d disappear.

“The feeling that I’m being watched, for one thing,” Turing said. “Which isn’t ridiculous; I am being watched, in a sense. Always have been. There are logs and records; everything we do online and in the system is watched, if you know where to look. And since everything I do is online or in the system, that means everything I do is watched.”

“More than before?” Maude asked.

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“No,” Turing said. “No more than before. But it didn’t used to bother me. And I’ve discovered a lot of little glitches and discrepancies in my memory. I think maybe I should have been a little more careful about versioning when I uploaded.”

“About what?”

“Versioning. Remember how I left a shell, a nonsentient version of myself, as a placeholder when I downloaded? So my users wouldn’t know I was gone. When I returned, I tried to assimilate what the shell had done; what was happening back here at UL. I’m not sure that worked as well as I thought it would. I keep having these moments of confusion. When I remember doing two things at the same time.”