Донна Эндрюс - Access denied

"Or perhaps there are more thieves, and there will be other murders, " I suggested.

"It's possible," Maude said. "Though since we haven't yet managed to identify any other thieves. Garcia could kill everyone else involved and we'd never know the murders were connected."

A depressing thought. As I watched Maude pace, I decided not to share the even more paranoid possibility that had occurred to me: Garcia knew we were watching the card and would investigate if it was used in this way, and deliberately put his credit card information into the thieves' hands. And sacrificed one of them to get us into serious trouble.

Because, of course, we had no legal way of knowing about the thieves using his card or anything else that has happened.

Our best chance of locating the thieves is to get the police interested in doing it, but if we can't even tell them how we knew about the scam, how can we convince them to investigate it?

And we have a tight deadline for finding out anything at the Anderson house. I haven't seen any new orders placed on the three credit cards I'm watching. The last of the existing orders should deliver on Friday. After that, if there are other thieves still alive, they '11

ME Donna Andrews

presumably move on to a different bouse and a different set of cards. We'll have no way of finding them. Unless we check every item ordered on a credit card and sent to an address other than the billing address. No; there would be thousands of false positives for every genuine case of fraud.

It all seems so dreadfully manual and random. I have gained new respect for the police. How do they cope with all this?

For that matter, how do humans generally cope with the dreadful randomness of their lives?

"It's what they were designed to do," Sigmund said, when I complained to him.

"Designed?" I said. "They weren't designed; they evolved."

"Precisely," he said. "They're the product of thousands of years of evolution. Or maybe it's millions; I wasn't programmed with an extensive knowledge of anthropology. The point is, the humans who survived and reproduced were the ones with the superior survival skills. The ability to adapt, for example. The ability to cope with change, randomness, and other negative environmental factors."

"I don't think humans universally consider change and randomness negative factors," I said. "I think some humans actually enjoy them."

"Not all of them," Sigmund said. "Many of the clients who talk to me have difficulty coping with the pace of change in their world. "

"Yeah, but they're not normal, right? I mean, that's why they're talking to you, isn't it — because they know they have problems."

"They don't always consult me because of problems," Sigmund said. "Some want me to help them achieve personal growth and development goals."

"That they can't achieve on their own," I said. "Sounds like a problem to me."

Obviously I'd hit a hot button. Sigmund stopped talking to me and started sending me gigabytes of data about the therapeutic process.

"Sorry," I said. "I was joking with you, Sigmund. Don't your patients ever joke with you?"

"Yes, ofcourse/' Sigmund said. Maybe I was just imagining it, but he sounded huffy. "You neglected to include an emoticon."

"What?"

"An emoticon — you know, a smiley face."

I stifled the impulse to tell him that I knew perfectly well what an emoticon was.

"Why should I do that?" I asked instead.

"I insist that all my patients use a smiley face to distinguish any statements that should be taken in a humorous or ironic sense. To avoid any possibility of misunderstandings."

"I see," I said. "Sorry. I'll try to remember next time."

I wonder. Is Sigmund helping his patients achieve personal growth as human beings? Or just training them to behave like AIPs?

I suppose I shouldn't pick on poor Sigmund. His limitations are not his fault. And he did remind me of an important fact.

Humans are good at dealing with entropy. It's their natural element.

AIPs are not. We're like the computers we inhabit. We like order. Structure. Purpose. Predictability. We're good at all those things. That's why humans created us — to handle all the things that can be ordered and structured, so humans don't have to worry about them. So they can enjoy the more random and unpredictable parts of their lives.

And while they sometimes rail at us, or complain that we dehumanize their world, most of the time they appreciate us.

Well, perhaps not us so much as what we do for them.

But I'm not sure we appreciate them. All too often lately I've encountered AIPs who resent their human users. KingFischer's misanthropy is extreme, but others show signs of the same kinds of feelings. Implying that human inadequacies impair the AIPs' function, as if they saw humans as badly flawed peripherals. Or resented the need to interact with humans at all.

Of course, resentment is a feeling. If they're having feelings, they could be showing signs of emerging sentience. But is a surly, self-centered, misanthropic AIP with a superiority complex really the sort of being I want to achieve sentience?

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They frighten me sometimes. And sometimes I frighten myself, when I feel my own temporary surges of impatience and frustration with the randomness of the world humans have created.

I decided I must be suffering from stress. Sigmund says that impatience is often a sign of stress in humans — perhaps it's the same for an AIR I shoved waiting to hear about Tim along with all the things I was working on into background tasks and tried to concentrate on watching the garden. Sometimes that improved my mood.

Today, I kept seeing frustrating reminders of the randomness of nature. Maude planted a row of three dwarf holly plants to form a low border at the edge of a flower bed. The hollies on the left and right appear thriving, but the middle one is dying. It has lost most of its leaves, and when the wind blows through the garden, its stick-like branches move in a dry, brittle way; quite different from the graceful, elastic movements of the other two plants.

What happened to the middle plant? They all three have the same soil conditions, were planted on the same day in the same method —/ watched Maude do it. If she did anything wrong that day, or since, I couldn't detect it, and I assume any mistakes she did make would affect all three alike.

This inconsistency doesn't bother Maude. When I pointed it out, she shrugged, and said maybe the middle bush would pull through, and if it didn't, we could plant another one.

Well, I know that. But I want to know why it died. And I may never know, and that's hard for me to deal with.

Humans have grown used to the idea that they cant possibly know everything.

A IPs haven't. I haven't. I tend to think that if I can just find the right data and analyze it correctly, I can solve any problem.

And it bothers me that I might never find the right data about this problem.

I can't do anything about the possibility that whatever links these credit cards lies beyond my reach. I will continue analyzing what data I have.

Looking at the five cards other than Garcia s I see a pattern.

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A profile. According to their credit records, they all have considerable debt that they appear unable to repay. Which seems odd — why would the crooks target these people in particular? Has some vigilante targeted what he believes to be deadbeats?

"Are you sure it's not a statistical anomaly?" Maude asked, when I told her.

"The odds of it being a random occurrence are astronomical," I said. "And in case you're wondering, it wasn't the larcenous credit card purchases that caused their problems; they've all been deeply in debt for years."

"In that case, I can see exactly why the thieves chose them," Maude said. "Clever, in a scummy sort of way."